Starlets with Scarlett fever
QUESTION Who was screen-tested for Scarlett O’Hara, in Gone With The Wind (1939), before Vivien Leigh won the role?
JUST 31 women did screen tests to play Scarlett, while hundreds had interviews.
Producer David O. Selznick and his organisation spent more than two years on their search. They saw models, debutantes, radio singers, amateur actresses and established Hollywood stars.
When Margaret Mitchell’s historical romance, set during and after the American Civil War, was published in 1936, it was a literary sensation. Selznick paid $50,000 to secure the film rights.
He whipped up anticipation by turning the casting of Scarlett into a national event.
Impassioned letters poured into his offices, with housewives from Portland to Poughkeepsie offering their two cents on who should play Mitchell’s sassy Southern belle. Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Paulette Goddard, Joan Crawford and Barbara Stanwyck were just a few of the names garnering write-in votes, but they never got screen tests.
Selznick wanted an unknown and Hollywood talent scout and agent Kay Brown was dispatched on a whistlestop rail tour of the South in search of a new girl to play the most talked-about literary creation in decades.
Brown claimed she held open auditions in Atlanta one Friday, and at least 500 people were there, including ‘every Miss Atlanta from 20 years back’. I found the process so fascinating that I wrote the book From Louise Platt To Paulette Goddard: Fifty Ladies Who Lost Out On Playing Scarlett O’Hara. Platt went on to star in Stagecoach (1939), while Goddard was Charlie Chaplin’s leading lady in Modern Times (1936).
Tallulah Bankhead was deemed too old, while stage actress Lynn Merrill, silent movie star Linda Watkins and model-turned-actress Susan Fox all tried out. Others included Adele Longmire, who declined a Selznick contract in favour of the Broadway stage.
Em Bowles Locker acted in plays at Vassar College but found her screen test unnerving.
A lot of women saw themselves as Scarlett, but the role went to the right person in the end.
Vivien Leigh was in America in November 1938 because she was missing her lover, Laurence Olivier, who’d gone to Hollywood to be in Wuthering Heights (1939). Vivien won the part, and had the talent and looks which brought her an Oscar for the role in 1940. Charlotte Horton, Bournemouth, Dorset.
QUESTION Is there a scientific explanation for why earphone cables get so entangled when they come out of your pocket?
WE KNOW from experience that an agitated string or cable tends to get knotted spontaneously.
There’s a scientific paper to prove it: Spontaneous Knotting Of An Agitated String, by Dorian M. Raymer and Douglas E. Smith, of the University of California at San Diego (2004). They examined the factors that affect the knotting probability by tumbling the string under different conditions.
When the string is shaken, the arrangement of it will become more complicated and form many gaps and holes. These holes increase the probability of knot formation. The researchers found this was dependent on the length of the string, saying: ‘A cord shorter than 46cm will almost never tangle itself when sealed inside a rotating box for a period.
‘But between 46cm and 150cm the probability of a knot forming rises dramatically.’
A standard earphone cable is in excess of 120cm so easily falls within this range.
S. P. Barnes, Hull, Yorkshire.
QUESTION Have any differences developed between the North and South Korean languages since partition?
THE languages are becoming increasingly different after South Korea embraced globalisation and North Korea adopted a strict isolationist approach.
From the 1960s onward, a major initiative was launched in the North to develop a new standard form of Pure Korean. This was personally directed by the Great
Leader Kim-Il-Sung as part of his state ideology Juche (self-reliance), a system bound up with ethno-nationalism.
In a 1964 speech, he criticised p’yojuno (standard) or Seoul Korean for having become a ‘polluted jumble’, one filled with ‘Western, Japanese and Chinese elements due to American imperialists and their followers’ national language erasure policy’.
He instituted cultural reforms which resulted in a new language standard based on Pyongyang (the capital of the North) speech, which was named munhwao (cultured language). A purge of loanwords, along with other measures changing the language with regard to writing and style, took place over the next decade, resulting in profound differences between the two languages.
Today, it’s estimated the lexicon in South Korean consists of 35% native Korean words, 60% of Chinese origin and 5% Western – socalled Konglish (an example of which is ‘selca’, an abbreviation of ‘self-camera’, the Korean equivalent to ‘selfie’). In contrast, purification activities in North Korean munhwao have produced a language that is 90% native Korean.
When contact occurred between representatives of the two countries in 1972, officials were shocked at how different the languages had become. The divergence is so strong, it seems possible that Korean in North and South Korea may become mutually unintelligible and develop into two different languages.
O Is there a question to which you have always wanted to know the answer? Or do you know the answer to a question raised here? Send your questions and answers to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Irish Daily Mail, DMG Media, Two Haddington Buildings, 20-38 Haddington Road, Dublin 4, D04 HE94. You can also fax them to 0044 1952 510906 or you can email them to charles. legge@dailymail.ie. A selection will be published but we are not able to enter into individual correspondence.